ken oppriecht

My images are all digital manipulations that begin as photographs. Each image is highly manipulated after a plain photo is taken. I see my adjustments as a form of painting but on a computer. If I wouldn’t paint it, then it is removed. The goal is still a “photographic” reality, or the real world perhaps, but one that is plainly fake at times. Brutal removals, severe editing, a minimalist approach, all are tactics I employ. 

The buildings images appear as facades or unassuming side faces, these are certainly banal architectural forms. There is a bleakness to these walls but color and details become the arrival of hope. Prison and flower are balanced and they are at once sad sack and triumphant. When made a picture the elements can be harmonized. Each image becomes a symphony of basic formalism, notes to be found and played.

The obelisks can be seen as totems. Silos and water towers are removed from their environment creating monoliths on a grand scale. Each image is big for photographs, 40” x 40”. Scale is important for the ratio of the large to the small to function. I see these as industrial monuments were singular structures and lasting timelessness co-mingle. Part of my draw to these structures is their ubiquity in the landscape, at once familiar but ultimately strange.

I also have series of “objects” seen as a hodgepodge of thing-ness. Less about an overriding vision and more a diary of the plainly seen. Parking stops to gravel piles, the theme wanders, linked by the obvious nature of the common place. I find these things to be curious once removed. These nod to conceptual and minimal art for a paradoxical aesthetic proposition but they are dumb or the idea has been removed.

WI